


The Emptiness of Full Boxes

by piecesofalice



Category: Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-02
Updated: 2010-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-05 15:35:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piecesofalice/pseuds/piecesofalice





	The Emptiness of Full Boxes

\---

  
Alex doesn't spend much time at home. Because of her job, or the kidnapping, or the memories of Joe; she doesn't recall a time she felt comfortable in her tiny living room in the past year and a bit.

  
Nate Berkus is on Oprah, throwing tips into the air about how to better organise your tiny piece of New York Cityspace. Alex watches the attractive decorator flounce across the screen and mental notes the shoe boxes under her bed, filled with photos and Yankees tickets, receipts and a certificate of marriage. The boxes are old and worn and wear names of designers long forgotten by _Vogue_, homes of shoes she'd thrown out when she moved to Major Case Squad, where stilletos are not easily worn.

  
Boxes. Eight of them. They're not organised but they're not in her way, so she can simply pretend they don't exist until the night of the full moon when she feels the pull of the past as certain as the _click_ and _whirrr_ her dishwasher makes when it's almost finished cleaning her two plates and four coffee cups.

She feels it when she's curled up on the patchworked couch eating soup from a bowl and watching TiVoed _Oprah_, like she's some mid-forties housewife with everything contained in tiny, stackable boxes that are a steal from IKEA for $199.99.

  
Then it all seems to crowd in on her, like being trapped in an elevator with memories that are too big for her world now, anyway.

  
\---

  
She's curled under the bumpy wrinkly blanket her grandma made, watching the Home Shopping Network and working her way through a cup of industrial strength coffee and popcorn in a bowl.

Oprah talked about mental health days on the show today, about taking some time to breathe and reflect and grow. It all seemed like bullshit until it didn't, and Alex decides to tally this out-of-character day off and feelings of weakness up to that.

That, and other factors; because she needs reasons and reasons are so easy to create. She sips and lists with the blanket over her ratty winter pyjamas (mentally and not audiably because she's not crazy, not yet).

  
Her period is due  
She's not had a day off in years  
The super may come by and fix the clanking noise the radiator is making  
Oprah's announcing the new book club book  
She's recovering/deciding/deducting/evolving/r

enewing/reducing  
She's reliving  
She's crying  
She's dying.

  
\----

  
The next day, she wakes up on the couch with the television on NBC's morning program. Tom Cruise is painting a picture of a wonderful marriage, and suddenly Alex feels so sick, she runs to the bathroom and makes it just in time to see her diet of caffeine and corn products fall into the toilet.

  
After she's emptied her stomach, she picks herself up and returns to the lounge room, just in time for the riviting, forgiving and empowering hour of Ms. Winfrey.

  
\---

  
Goren calls every fifteen minutes, but her phone is on silent and she doesn't notice the glowing screen in face of Dr. Phil McGraw dancing across her screen.

  
\---

  
It's close to five o'clock in the afternoon, and she puts on a pot of tea. She's staring into her tiny, useless backyard, when the slamming noise of a fist against a door breaks into her mind finally, loudly, like the weeds that she's been tracing with her eyes along the clothesline.

  
She knows it's Goren, but she doesn't answer the door. Instead, she pours two cups and places them on the coffee table and her body under the blanket that smells of Grandma and coffee and Joe, and she waits.

  
When he remembers he has a key, she's already half-way through her tea, and she feels how much her eyes sting from the rubbing and the tears. He's standing in the doorway, his face broken in half like the last cookie in the jar, and he knows she's been a widow for ten years now and it's only now, finally, hitting home that she's alone and faceless and nothing.

  
She's not weak. She's human, and that seems to be the worst thing about it, so she begins to cry and hates herself for doing so in the prescence of the one person she never, ever wanted to see her fall.

  
_Everyone has to fall in order to get up again._

  
He doesn't blink, or breathe. He wraps her up, on his lap like a pile of knotted knitting, and begins to put her back together again.

  
\---

  
Later, they order takeout and watch _Oprah_, together.

  
Later, she shows him her shoeboxes, and he smiles when he sees there is one dedicated solely to him.

  
And later still, he takes his shoes off and lets his partner fall asleep against him, and she sleeps.

  
She doesn't dream of the dead.

  
\---

  
_Fin._

  
\---


End file.
